MSI HD 7850 1GB review

Is 1GB of memory enough on a modern graphics card?

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For

Great performance

Very competitive price

Against

Not much, really

We have to admit this was a bit of a surprise. We wanted to get the 1GB version of the HD 7850 to test it against the HD 7770 more than anything else - assuming this would be the card it'd be going up against. After all, the 2GB frame buffer of the stock HD 7850 must be partly responsible for its impressive showing at hi-res, right? And that's putting post-processing such as anti-aliasing in the mix.

How wrong we were. It seems that the bottleneck to the Pitcairn Pro's performance is not the memory at all - the GPU itself bottlenecks performance well before the memory gets anywhere near making things crawl.

What does that mean though? Well, it means the 1GB version of the HD 7850, especially the slightly overclocked version supplied by MSI, is more than able to keep pace with the stock 2GB version of the Pitcairn Pro card.

As we were going through the benchmarking and the 1080p performance was staying resolutely high we were expecting it to drop off a cliff as soon as we upped things to 2,560 x 1,600. Not so. We were still seeing it hit 40fps in Batman: AC at the highest settings, and a still pretty impressive 24fps on the top settings in DiRT: Showdown. For a £120 card to be able to do that is pretty much unprecedented.

This is the only card we'd recommend for a budget-busting multi-GPU setup for this very reason. At £240 you'll hit the sort of performance the HD 7950 at that price simply cannot match.

Tech Specs

Product Type

Graphic Card

Chipset Manufacturer

AMD

Chipset Model

HD 7850

HDMI

Yes

Chipset Line

Radeon

Chipset Series

HD 7000

DisplayPort

Yes

Maximum Resolution

2560 x 1600

Brand Name

MSI

Standard Memory

1 GB

Host Interface

PCI Express 3.0 x16

HDCP Supported

Yes

Bus Width

256 bit

Multi-GPU Technology

CrossFire

Green Compliant

Yes

Green Compliance Certificate/Authority

RoHS

RAMDAC Speed

400 MHz

Digital Signal

Yes

Dual Link DVI Supported

Yes

DVI

Yes

Number of DisplayPort Outputs

2

Number of DVI Outputs

1

Number of HDMI Outputs

1

Height

115 mm

Cooler Type

Fan Cooler

Memory Technology

GDDR5 SDRAM

Form Factor

Plug-in Card

Length

202 mm

Manufacturer

Micro-Star International Co., Ltd

Memory Speed

4800 MHz

Product Model

R7850-1GD5/OC

Product Name

R7850-1GD5/OC Radeon HD 7850 Graphic Card

Package Type

Retail

Manufacturer Part Number

R7850-1GD5/OC

Manufacturer Website Address

http://www.msicomputer.com

Marketing Information

Leading international graphics card maker MSI has always been a key player in the competitive graphics card market. Thanks to its strong R&D capabilities and outstanding product performance, MSI's products have always received high acclaim by the media and consumers throughout the world.